Monthly Income, Growth & Traffic Report – June 2015

This is the 13th income report from my Online Journey. (Read last month’s income report here.)

Every month, I will publish a report like this to show the progress of this blog as well as the results of other activities I have carried out in order to hit my 2015 Goal.

What Is Going On?

June was a month of preparation for me. My wife and I are expecting our second child in October. Yes, I did not talk about this for the past last few income reports as it was actually a surprise for us because by the time we found out in March, my wife was 3 months pregnant.

In the beginning of this year, I thought that her health was not great. So in March, I asked her to quit her job and maybe stay at home to rest. To our surprise, we found out later she was pregnant. At first we were not sure how to handle it because of the sudden income drop by half and we were not sure if we could cope with it. Our first daughter is still attending full day childcare which costs about $900 SGD per month. So we started a plan to downgrade our lifestyle for the past 3 months. Here are some of the examples:-

Instead of taking a taxi frequently, we started to take public transport. Our rule was only to take taxi home are if we are unsure of the location or either one of us is very tired or it is very late at night. We saved a few hundreds dollars per month by sticking to our rules

Instead of eating out, we started to cook at home more frequently. For now, we only eat at restaurants when there is special occasion.

We also try to cut down our daily expenses like pampers and milk and start potty training our first daughter. By doing, this we did actually save another few hundreds per month.

Our weekends are spent exploring different parks in Singapore and doing some other family activities which doesn’t cost much. I must admit, we used to spend a lot for our child’s activities.

So to be honest a lot of people don’t agree the things we did and many keep asking my wife when she is going back to work. I am also tired of answering question like “Can your income support the family?” Instead of hearing all the negative comments we are making full use of the extra time to prepare our 1st daughter for the arrival of her sister.

While my wife was handling all the family stuff this time round, I was busy with my business and day time job. The extra income from the business offloaded some of the expenses as well. At least for now, my monthly income is not tied to my monthly salary and can scale rather than waiting for a pay rise.

For the month of June, my team and I went through a lot of planning together with our joint venture partners for both of our ecommerce niche sites. We had implemented a sales forecast for the next 6 months and also our monthly promotions for both sites. Things are definitely looking great.

June Website Income Progress

As you can see, there is a drop in term of visitors for the month of June, however Adsense income was greater than the usual. I had also started to update the site for the ‘Advertise with Us’ page, an improved ‘About Us’ page and removed a lot of unnecessary stuff that is affecting the user experience.

The blog is again shortlisted for Singapore Blog Award 2015 under the ‘Best Food Blog in Singapore’ category. It was honoured to be shortlisted again because the Singapore Blog Award is the biggest blogger event in Singapore.

July Action Plan

Creating new eBook to attract more email subscriber.

Creating email funnel to attract email subscriber back to my site

This is my first JV E-commerce site, showing all the revenue generated by online sales through ecommerce and I take a 15% profit of the total net revenue. For the month of June, I did not really promote much for this site; however this site still continues to generate revenue automatically without much active promotion.

As you can see most of the traffic comes from organic searches, and the SEO strategy I am using is the switchbox SEO technique which previously has been discussed. However, the niche in the local market was very competitive and most of the competitors are using SEO to drive traffic to their site as well.

For the month of June, I had also setup the ecommerce tracking in Google analytics to see which traffic channel gives the best conversation rate. I will let it run for one month to collect all the data needed.

July Action Plan

Make sure the e-commerce tracking in Google analytics is working

Post at least 4 more blog posts for the month

I did not explain much about this niche e-commerce site I have previously. For this site, it is almost the same as project 1 except that the 15% profit sharing of overall sales which include online and offline will only be shared in December. However, I did not have the data for offline sales, and for reporting purposes, I will just include the 15% profit for online sales first.

This site product can be targeted globally. However for the year of 2015, we are only focusing on Singapore. The site is targeting at Women for the apparel industry.

The JV partner agreed to give a monthly marketing budget to my team for all the marketing effort. For the year 2015, our online sales target was $30k from February to December.

Based on the data collected from April to June, we know that social media is the number 1 traffic source but is converting at only 0.02%. SEO traffic is giving the highest conversion rate at 1.74% with a bounce rate of only 27.62%. The second best traffic source is from the email list. We did not really plan our monthly promotion from February to May, however seeing a big drop in revenue in May. We started to plan our monthly promotion 3 months ahead.

For the month of June, we are back on track with a total net revenue 3936.73 which is the highest month so far.

What another great month to finish off with a 4 figure profit and is the 3rd highest so far. As always, I would love to hear your feedback, so please leave any thoughts or questions that you might have in the comments section below. Thanks